Sino-Japanese Linguistic Influence
After humanity broke free of the confines of its homeworld, Earth's dominant languages, among them Chinese and Japanese, began asserting their influence over their colonies' culture, spoken and written linguistic system. History Humanity managed to escape their homeworld and establish colonies throughout the Sol system, at first confined in the inner part. However, after the invention of the Epstein drive, mankind ventured past the Asteroid Belt and settled on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. The colonies were influenced by many major Earther cultures. The planet's languages grew beyond the bounds of their traditional home, especially regarding more prominent cultures, such as specific Asian cultures like Chinese and Japanese. Although far more languages were blended together, those with a greater number of speakers asserted their dominance over less common tongues. This process became less intense after humanity began spreading across the galaxy, having previously broken free of their home system's boundaries, considering that the colonists were already speakers of a pluri-linguistic tongue and no further blending was possible. Pluri-ethnic cultures Belter Lang belta is the result of several donor languages having blended their vocabulary and grammatical properties into a single, unitary tongue. The process took several generation to reach completion, as Belter was reaching a greater degree of divergence from its original donors. Chinese greatly influenced the final result of languages, especially the most frequently used vocabulary, even more so than Japanese. This is due in part to China's superpower position prior to the unification of Earth under the United Nations, while Japan, although a major regional economical force, was inferior to China's massive military and economy. However, the Chinese alphabet is rarely used among the Belt's populace, having resorted to latin characters for phrasal structures originally from Chinese or Japanese. A noted example of Belter vocabulary originating from Chinese is the use of the word dui, a pinyin romanization of the word (对) used for an affirmative response to a request for confirmation like the word'' yes''.dui - (对) - borrowed from Mandarin. "yes", "correct", "agreed", "true" Chapter 6 Chapter 9, 17 Chapter 17, 26, 31, 41, 42, 44 like "Dwayne" but without the "n" at the end Another example, "xie xie" (谢谢), is routinely used for showing gratitude and is largely the Belter equivalent of the English thank you.xie xie - (谢谢) - borrowed from Mandarin. "thank you" chapter 7 These words are routinely intermixed with others originating from other major tongues, such as Spanish, French, and German. Martian There are routine insertions of Chinese script characters alongside the English counterparts, especially on Martian iconography, a significantly common practice in the MCRN. Names Similarly to language and culture, Sino-Japanese influences are strong in the names of people, vessels, and even massive interplanetary organizations, such as Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile. Some names are homonyms and might have different meanings depending on the original untransliterated word. |-|Vessels = |-|People = Notes * Traditional Chinese writing uses characters that are ideographic/iconographic and express ideas more than they express sounds. * When Chinese is written in one of its transliterated or "pinyin" forms, it is phonetic. That is, it borrows Latin characters to spell out sounds. there are some major compromises to this approach. * There are alternative phonetic systems, language-specific symbolic forms as well that represent phonemes/sonemes (language-specfic sounds) more precisely/accurately than the pinyin romanization systems. Scholars have devised a number of these character-based phonetic systems. They've even been converted into electronic input methods for computing with text in Chinese. * When translating Chinese words from a transliterated or romanized writing, there will be inherent ambiguity and context is needed for accuracy. This is especially crucial since the transliteration is a simplified phonetic system and there are numerous homonyms. One simplification that causes complication is the distinct tonal nature of the language pronunciation. Media File:MCRN_Destroyer_Shandian_shadowing_Arboghast.jpg File:Sutton-001.png External Links * Wikipedia - Written Chinese Category:Belter language